Testimonials: The Community in Support of CMO/BIRS

It was an amazing conference. I was able to make some insights into the research I am performing nowadays. It was amazing to share experiences, knowledge an ideas with people from many countries and different cultural backgrounds. I made new contacts with people that more or less share my research interest that I didn't know they existed. Also, it was a good oportunity to our research group to get known internationally.

The Symbolic Dynamics workshop at CMO-BIRS was the best get together I've been to in years. Events like this enhance the vitality of our entire field. It's exciting to know people are reading and talking about each other's work, asking interesting questions and solving each other's problems.
The one word summary of the workshop: synchronized.
Synchronization was a theme in many of the talks. I have a collaboration on this topic, and I was able to discuss it with my collaborator and other experts between the talks. The project has been revitalized and given exciting new directions to consider.
A fantastic home for one of the nicest mathematical communities around.

The workshop gave a beautiful and wide overview of many recent developments in symbolic dynamics and related fields. It gave me the opportunity to discuss with several colleagues and begin new discussions in a pleasant environment. I even ended up betting a Japanese dinner on whether a given dynamical system has positive sofic entropy!

This workshop was one of the most well organized and interesting which I already participated. Wonderfull place and food. Very interesting talks and people available to discuss. I had conversations about topics in Symbolic Dynamics and Thermodynamic Formalism with many people. I asked questions for some of them, old questions which I was thinking about already a lot of time. I started a paper with one of the participants and got a lot of references from the talks and videos.
I met people which I was reading their papers and got some feedback about my results.
Very productive and pleasant week!

It was an amazing workshop. Great environment to work and very interesting talks. By attending the talks, I got a couple of questions I would like to work on in the near future. I worked on ongoing projects with some colleagues and even started a possible new collaboration. Overall a great experience.

This meeting was extremely interesting and useful to me. Almost every talk was well planned, informative, and dealt with new ideas and results. In addition, the informal times at meals and breaks provided excellent opportunities to ask about what's "really" going on, and how to think about certain ideas, which can be revelatory. I was really grateful to be there, renewing old connections and meeting so many new and young researchers in the field.
Looking back, three events stand out for me:
(1) Tim Austin's talk on extending the thermodynamic formalism to free groups drew on the idea of a random past, which was completely new to me, and may have a serious impact on my own work. He told me about the right picture to keep in mind, which in just a few minutes gave me an insight that otherwise would have taken a lot of work to decode. He mentioned a paper he'd written with a postdoc about this, and when I inquired about where this postdoc is working, told me that she is at my own institution, in fact as it turns out just a few doors away from my office! She works in probability theory and I hadn't made the connection.
(2) Ville Salo is a very bright postdoc in Finland, full of ideas, some of them a bit crazy, but always interesting. We had several wild discussions about cellular automata on groups that left my head spinning, but also stimulated some quite serious questions.
(3) Two young researchers Sebastián Barbieri and Filipe García Ramos got into a long discussion with me about a particular example of an algebraic action of a free group. The analogous example for a free abelian group was enormously influential in dynamics, and started the whole subject of "algebraic dynamics". Here the question is whether its entropy is zero or positive. I thought zero, they thought positive. So we made a bet, with the loser(s) owing the winner(s) a Japanese dinner! A similar bet I made with Klaus Schmidt in the early 1990s, with the same stakes, on a entropy question (which I lost) resulted in the discovery of Mahler measure as entropy, and created in a small industry that is quite active even today. Perhaps the outcome of this bet will have an impact like this as well, but in any event I'm sure some very interesting mathematics will come out of settling this problem, not to mention a satisfying dinner!

I had the chance to present my results to leading researchers on the field. They could give me new input what to work next on. Also, I made new contacts with people I had not met before. Furthermore, I have a better overview over the research field now. Since I am only in my second year of the PhD this had been a truly fruitful experience for me.

This workshop organized at CMO was very intense. It was a very effective way to catch up about the current research and be ahead of curve. The organizers organized the days around four lectures by junior people in the field, allowing for ample time for collaborations. I am leaving super excited, with a bag full of new research problems, and with new connections across the world.

The workshop did a great job of disseminating ongoing and current research in the subject of G2 geometry. There were several talks by researchers new to the field, the majority of which focussed on ongoing research rather than published papers. This helped me and other participants gain a sense of the direction in which the subject is travelling.
My PhD student gave a talk. This opportunity certainly enhanced his career prospects, and subsequent discussions that he had with experts in the field have influenced his future research plans. On a personal level, the workshops allowed me to make progress in an ongoing collaborative research project and to start a new collaboration. The workshop proved an ideal forum to discuss important open problems and future directions for this research area.

Derek HarlandAssociate Professor
School of Mathematics, University of Leeds

My experience organizing a workshop at the CMO in Oaxaca was excellent. The facilities were great, the staff was incredibly helpful, and the food was exceptional. I would certainly do it again.
The workshop itself was also great. We made a point of showcasing the work of junior participants which I believe resulted in an environment full of energy and enthusiasm.

Spiro KarigiannisAssociate Professor
Department of Pure Mathematics, University of Waterloo

This workshop enabled me to meet a new crowd of people and establish contacts which will certainly be important in the future.
I also discovered a field of research that was almost entirely new for me and this should lead to new opportunities of collaborations.

This was an excellent workshop! The substantial number of junior participants and speakers resulted in vibrant and stimulating exchanges of ideas.
Personally, I received a number of interesting questions in relation to `toric geometry of exceptional holonomy manifolds' that I am hopeful will lead to concrete projects.
I met a number of young researchers with overlapping interests and hope that we will keep exchanging ideas at future events.

This was certainly one of my favourite workshops. The size of the workshop and the excellent professional working environment and support made it possible, as participants, to get to know each other, have intense scientific discussions and get inspiration for new ideas.

Eric BergshoeffVan Swinderen Institute, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Groningen

I thought this recent workshop at CMO was among the better ones I have been to in recent years. I found the discussions about contentious issues to be constructive and informative, and I came away with several new things to think about.
It was also very well organized, both scientifically and logistically. It was the kind of meeting with which your institutions should be proud to be associated.

The workshop has been very nice and fruitful. I particularly enjoyed the relaxed schedule which allowed for a lot of time for informal discussions. The invited speakers were also world leaders in their field of research and the venue is fantastic.

My participation did impact my research, I learned a lot from the talks and from the discussions with other people. It was very good to have a relaxed schedule of talks with plenty of time to discuss. I also met new poeple and it seems possible to start a new collaboration from the workshop.

I really appreciate these kind of workshops at CMO. They bring us up to the edge of knowledge almost in every field. I am working in cancer research, from the physics point of view, and I found in this workshop a variety of perspectives from cancer biology and mathematical modeling that enrich my lines of research. In fact, I made great connections with other colleagues and we started to plan for near future collaborations in common interests.

This was a highly profitable workshop, with a lot of new contacts and the option to start a new paper. In addition, the surroundings are quite enjoyable, not to mention the local food. I hope the future location and conditions of the CMO will be as enjoyable!
All the best and many thanks for giving us the opportunity of organizing this workshop. We are looking future opportunities to stay at CMO (or BIRS).

As an organizer I very much benefited from the workshop, which was at the interface of my field and a connected one, since this allowed me to obtain a better picture from the connected scientific field. It also allowed me to draw clear new open problems of interest, both in my field and the connected one. It was also the opportunity to meet brilliant PhD students who I will consider for postdoc positions.

The CMO-BIRS workshop was quite beneficial to my research program. I got to talk to several mathematicians that I don't see very often, including Alastair King, Daniel Labardini Fragoso, and Alfredo Najera Chavez. In particular, my conversations with Daniel Labardini Fragoso have lead to the start of collaboration between the two of us.

My participation in the CMO-BIRS workshop on Stability condition and Representation Theory of Finite-Dimensional Algebras had a very good impact on my current research, helped us learn more about the field and motivated new projects and insight. We also met new people working in our field and we are collaborating with some. It was an amazing opportunity to advance in our favorite scientific discipline.

It was a great experience!. First of all, we could work in an comfortable enviroment and suitable place with all the facilities. Secondly, I could meet researchers, interesting topics and I knew a lot of useful ideas that I will definitely apply to my field. Thank you.

First of all, in my opinion, most of the lectures were very good, both in terms of mathematical content and presentation. Some of them were excellent. I updated my knowledge on what is going on in my area.
I also had a few interesting conversations with my collaborators, we stated some questions and made a little progress.

Indeed the Neostability workshop I just attended was extremely successful, on all accounts. It was mathematically very exciting, and on the organizational level vey smooth. Oaxaca itself is a wonderful town which I would always want to go back to.
Once again, many thanks for the invitation to attend the meeting.

I found the conference extremely stimulating - practically all talks were in areas of my research interest. I was particularly struck by the three talks on NSOP1 - I had not been aware that this area had made such great progress since the last workshop three years ago, and that there now was a well-developed theory. This will certainly have a major impact on my future research.

The workshop was unique in a sense that the people working on Iwasawa thery aspects of p-adic L-functions and the people working on the analytic aspects of the special values of automorphic L-functions got together. The former must have benefitted by learning the recent advances in the filed of the latter and the latter must have benefitted from knowing what kind of results are needed for the advancement of theory of the former. It might take a few to several years to witness the actual published papers resulted from this workshop. But I am sure that the workshop was very inspiring and stimulating to the people on the both sides. I hope that a workshop of this kind would be held once in every few years or so.

I really enjoyed the workshop, from which I gained a lot of new knowledge on a field (p-adic L-functions) that is close to my research area yet I am not very familiar with. Among many workshops I have been to, this is one of the most well-organized. I would like to give special thanks to the organizers for their careful design of the lectures at the workshop, from examples to more advanced topics and to technical cores. In addition, I enjoyed the discussion with experts in this area. This was a great opportunity for me to hear up-close the experts talking about their comments on their research and the key points and difficulties in their work.

I was in the automorphic side and many introductory talks and the two series lectures helped me a lot to have better understanding on p-adic L-functions. On the other hand, the geometric talks in Thursday afternoon sounded rather fascinating. l got to know the hot topics in this area.
It impacted my current research on cyclotomic p-adic triple product L-functions. I discussed mutual interest especially with my collaborator Ming-Lun Hsieh. This may lead us to a new results or projects. All the speakers have high standards and the place is wonderful.
I was a new face and got to know many mathematicians in this area

The workshop was very stimulating. I was especially interested by interaction between LCFT which was central topics in the workshop and TFT which is my main interest, and indeed the meeting was excellent for this purpose. I had opportunity to communicate with new people working on problems and structures which are parallel to those I meet in my field. The conditions of the workshop made communications possible at excellent level.

Actually it was the first time that I visited CMO and really enjoyed. In fact, speakers of the workshop were high level Graph theorists of the world and their presentations and results taught me a lot. I am sure this workshop will affect my students and postdoc.

BIRS provides an excellent environment to meet researchers across the world, and spend valuable working time with them. I cannot imagine a better atmosphere for mathematical research and HQP exposure.
The logistical support from BIRS is superb, and the benefits to all of us is immense.

I was able to meet with Florian Lehner so that we could finish our work on distinguishing numbers of vertex-transitive graphs of valency 4.
I also saw many great talks which gave me ideas on further research directions to pursue.

This workshop has been very helpful to me. In particular, my discussion with the participants gave me some insight on some new potential research that I might start during my next sabbatical starting in January of next year.

The workshop helped me confirm that the research I am currenty engaged in with my Ph.D. advisees and other colleagues is not only highly original but that it has eluded others' attempts. This will be great for my students. I hope my presentation was enlightening for the people in attendance.
The location is stunning, please have more workshops in Oaxaca!

Frederi Viens Professor and Chair of Statistics and Probability, Director of Actuarial Science Program
Statistics and Probability, Michigan State University

The workshop provided an excellent opportunity for researchers in probability, stochastic analysis, and related areas to interact with and learn from each other. The talks are of high quality and the discussions are very stimulating to me.
The staff members of CMO are very nice, professional, and helpful. The facility is excellent.

Attending this workshop was very useful to me. I came to know of several recent developments in my field and also some of them have given me some new ideas to work on. I also met some younger mathematicians whom I had not met before. I thank BIRS for all the arrangements.

The workshop helped me a lot; for the topics of interest addressed, for the contacts I could make that I would not have had otherwise, for reinforcing the ones I already had, and above all for the chance of a postdoctoral stay abroad.

The BIRS workshop on the Theory and Practice of Satisfiability Solving was a great meeting. Many useful ideas were exchanged and there was something new to learn for everyone. Personally, I obtained a number of new insights that will be very helpful for my research, and might even produce some immediate new results.

It was an enlightening encounter with proof complexity theorists and practitioners. It allowed me to pivot into a new subfield of SAT solving, narrowing down broad research topics into short-term research goals.

The workshop sparked several new research project I am planning right now. I started a new job with new teaching duties last year and lost track of the new results in the field. The workshop had been a great chance to catch up.

The workshop clearly updated me on current research, in my specific case, especially in relation to the industrial needs.
The workshop will affect future research and add different aspects to my future proposal, as above, with respect to modelling for industrial use.

This was an excellent meeting. I learnt a lot my specific area of research and all presentations were at high standard. Not only I could learn about new results, I was also able to see some revision of old results presented in a prospective fashion.

Raffaella Ocone Professor
School of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University

This workshop is very well organized. Participants include full professors, associate and assistant professors, as well as Postdoc, PhD, and industrial experts. Different research work have benn presented, but within the same discipline, I.e., multiscale CFD of multiphase flows. Apart from presentations, there were also round table discussions. I have gained many fresh insights from those days. It was also a very good networking time. Thanks to the organizers and CMO-BIRS.

I learned new things about pseudorandomness, discrepancy, communication complexity, hyperbolic polynomials, and discrete harmonic analysis, all of which I think will be helpful for my future research. As a graduate student, it was also helpful to hear about so many open problems. I also got the chance to speak to quite a few people I hadn't met, all of whom had a great deal to teach me. Several of these conversations led to new approaches to open problems, which will likely lead to future collaboration.

My participation in the CMO-BIRS workshop "analytic techniques in theoretical computer science" has been very valuable. I got to meet colleagues who work in adjacent areas of research to mine, to learn about recent developments in the field, and to discuss open problems and research directions. In particular, the tutorials provided a great way to learn about recent breakthroughs.

Shachar LovettAssociate Professor
Computer Science, University of California, San Diego

This was an excellent workshop. The technical program was very strong, and provided an advanced overview of recent developments in the use of analytic methods in Computational Complexity and Algorithms.

First of all let me thank you for the opportunity to participate in the workshop. I found it very enjoyable. The organization and work by Gabriel Gatica, Johnny Guzman, Gerardo Hernández Dueñas and Maxim Olshanskiy was excellent. Everything worked very nice and the result was a formidable week of work.
I want to share that the time at BIRS-CMO indeed helped my research. It gave me some perspective and ideas to pursue in order to try to solve some particular problems we have back in our group. Moreover, I took some notes, gather some of the presentations and had chance to talk and discuss further details with different people during the workshop. I have already talked to some people from our group so that we can start reading and exploring some ideas presented in the workshop. Personally, it also helped me to do some networking.

It was a very special meeting: there was genuine interaction between the sometimes disparate Higgs bundles and harmonic maps communities. I learned an enormous amount and had many interactions that I hope will blossom into something more concrete.

The conference in Oaxaca was a great success and was for me the occasion to learn exciting new developments.
Rather than inviting specialists in one given topic, the organisers chose to bring together a mixed crowd with different mathematical interests (Higgs bundles, harmonic mappings, calssicla differential geometry, Anosov representations). This was very successful. Most, if not all of them, of the talks were excellent and at the right level, giving enough background for such a diverse audience and also presenting new ideas. It gave me the opportunity to reconnect with classical differential geometry but also to hear first class talks giving both introduction to hot topics (twistor lines and their moduli spaces, WKB approximation of semiflat metrics; harmonic mappings in symmetric spaces notably in the context of split or hermitian groups) as well as clear description of how the results were ultimately proved. The size of the audience as well as the facilities were optimal and informal conversations helped me a lot in improving my knowledge and my understanding of the talks.

I was strongly impressed with many recent new results on Higgs bundles and harmonic maps which were explained in the workshop. I learned that some problems which I have been interested were already partially developed, and I am interested in what to do in the next stage. It was also significant for me to get to know some people whose works I had known.

Takuro Mochizuki Professor
Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Kyoto University

The talks, between 50-60 minutes with discussion time afterwards, have all been very well prepared and were highly interesting content wise.
The schedule of 5 talks per day, with mixed themes, encouraged all participants to attend the talks.
Since the workshop had two different groups come together for (possibly) the first time, initial worries of the two groups being somewhat separated vanished on day one: participants from the two groups were (1) very surprised how results/methods/conjectures from one group played significant roles in results/methods/conjectures of the other group and (2) how much overlap and ease of communication there was between the two groups.
Many discussions and exchanges between participants of the two groups happened throughout the meeting.
Existing collaborations were continued during the workshop and new collaborations started. Each group learned of the relevant problems of the other group and suggestions for approaches/solutions were discussed and sometimes new progress was made.
Ph. D. students and post docs got a very comprehensive view of the subjects and could readily discuss questions with experts in the field. Interesting discussions between young researchers and more stablished experts happened throughout the workshop. Senior participants also got to know younger colleagues through their very well received talks (which I am sure will have impact on future hiring decisions of those young researchers).
In my view the meeting was very successful in bringing the two aspects of the field together. The atmosphere of the workshop from the start was relaxed, open, and vertically integrated. Participants mixed nicely during meal times and discussions, started after talks, continued over meals and later into the evening. Often smaller groups stood in front of the black boards in the walkway and discussion room to carry out calculations as a team.
The overall atmosphere of the workshop was one of permanent exchanges of ideas and collaborations--as if the workshop was some kind of research outfit working on a common project. It was very inspirational, very stimulating, and there was a very strong sense and wish among all participants to continue such meetings in the near future.

The setting of the CMO workshop was beautiful and highly conducive to scientific interaction. Staying in Oaxaca, eating meals together, and interacting in the conference meeting rooms encouraged new collaborations. The format of the conference helped me to see new research and present my own work to new potential collaborators. Through the conference, I met several scientists with whom I plan to start collaborations. The highly interdisciplinary nature of the meeting also allowed me to get to know new fields of study that will enhance my own research.

The workshop on "self-similarity, long range dependence and extremes" has provided a very precious overview of the recent advances in the field as well as an occasion for constructive discussions that open the paths for future research.
Thank you for this great opportunity !

It's my pleasure to attend this great workshop. I had the chance to listen to a variety of interesting talks, and have learned lots from them. It was also a great opportunity for me to meet some researchers outside my field.

I love attending meetings at BIRS cause they are of constant high scientific quality. I mean top researchers gathering to discuss highly relevant hot research. I enjoy the opportunity to discuss research and ask questions. It is inspiring to get new unusual insights and work together in a stimulating atmosphere.
Thanks to BIRS and organisers for providing a scientific forum of this type! It is a great service to scientific community.

The workshop "IV Reunión de Matemáticos Mexicanos en el Mundo" organized by the CMO-BIRS and Sociedad Matemática Mexicana was one of my best academic experiences as a student. This workshop was interesting, well organized and allowed me to talk with people that are currently studying or working outside of Mexico.
While talking with other participants I gathered information first hand of some graduate school options. In addittion, I discovered some options that I had not considered before. I'm sure the contacts and information I gained in this workshop will have a positive impact in my academic future. As a result of this workshop, one participant showed interest in my work and now we're looking to collaborate.

Participating in the 2018 Mexican Mathematicians in the World, allowed me to properly network and explore opportunities in México for someone who has chosen a career in Mathematics. I received the help that I needed and met many interesting people. At some point, I did not know if Number Theory was of interest in México, yet I am surprised that there are strong students and postdocs interested in this and related areas. Being currently based at the Math Institute in Valparaíso, Chile, it is important to stay in touch and promote academic exchange.

The CMO-BIRS workshop "IV Reunión de Matemáticos Mexicanos en el Mundo" was an interesting and well-organized workshop. I definitely enjoyed the meeting, but the most important part is that I met new people to collaborate. Moreover, I also discovered a wide range of job/postdoc opportunities at institutions outside Mexico.
I am sure that my participation in this workshop would improve my short-term future as a mathematician.

The 2 BIRS meetings I have attended ('Rules of Protein-DNA Recognition: Computational and Experimental Advances) have been some of the most useful and interesting conferences I've been to! There was great discussion during the questions session after many talks that helped flesh out and clarify some of the most exciting recent findings in the field. After both meetings, I became involved in new collaborations with other scientists who had attended.

I had the pleasure to attend the "Rules of Protein-DNA Recognition: Computational and Experimental Advances" workshop. This gave the opportunity to interact with scientific leaders in the field, discuss my research, and start new collaborations.

The workshop was a great success for me personally. I gained lots of knowledge on the most up-to-date research in my field. I continued collaborations I started in my previous BIRS meeting and started new ones, which I could not have started hadn't I attended this meeting. This was definitely the most fruitful meeting I attended this year.

This was a very good workshop. I learned some new, interesting results that led to some very productive discussions over dinner and during the rest of the meeting. Those ideas should lead to some new experiments to test the models that emerged.

Gary StormoProfessor
Department of Genetics, Washington University in St. Louis

The "Rules of Protein-DNA Recognition: Computational and Experimental Advances" was certainly one of the best meetings I have ever attended. The setting is exquisite, and the entire meeting was run flawlessly.
The scientific content of this meeting was second-to-none. I returned with over 14 pages of notes based on the presentations and interactions with other attendees. In general, there was vigorous scientific discourse throughout the meeting, particularly on contentious topics. I have numerous new leads and likely projects that would not have happened without this meeting. In particular, I will be writing a grant with Trevor Siggers, co-authoring a paper with Juan Fuxman-Bass, and rekindling a collaboration with Charles Vinson.

This was an incredible workshop with a dense programme of excellent talks on exciting new developments in arithmetic geometry, while still leaving some time for collaborations and inspiring discussions.

The workshop gave me the opportunity to meet many new esteemed mathematicians in my field, including a number I likely otherwise wouldn't have met. It gave me several new ideas for my current research problems. It also gave me the opportunity to talk to mathematicians I had previously met, and one of them suggested a problem to me that I plan to think about in the future. In general, it was helpful for broadening the techniques I might use to attack problems.

The workshop was greatly useful! The biggest thing is that I have a new result that was very useful to present and get feedback on. Beyond that, I benefit a lot from conferences like this that blend participants from different subareas of the same field; it was very useful, especially, to get to talk a lot to Browning's students and share ideas and techniques. I have been thinking a lot about the function field case of what many of his students have been working on, and it was useful to discuss.
I am already tenured, so it didn't affect my job prospects; but one of my current phd students, and one of my former (who is not a post doc) both presented, and both had lively discussions afterwards. Additionally, my student was able to spend the breaks finalizing a preprint with a postdoc who was present.

My participation in the CMO-BIRS workshop on the distributed statistics and optimization was a great experience, for both my research and my summer life.
I got to learn a lot of cutting edge research topics during the workshop, which enlightened me with many interesting research ideas.
I also got the chance to talk to different researchers from all over the world on new ideas, their insights on the development of the hot topics.
This workshop was a small size one, which made it possible for people who attended to really get to know each other. Students had more chances to talk to professors and benefited a lot.

As usual, the CMO-BIRS workshop was a great opportunity to discuss research and exchange ideas with colleagues from around the world. This year the conversations turned out to be particularly valuable - significant progress was made on a number of ongoing research problems.

The facilities in Oaxaca are outstanding in several ways.
For one, the layout of the hacienda is conducive to both ambient and exacting discussions, with chalkboards strewn about, and with comfortable bedrooms equipped with chairs, tables, and a couch. The conference room is proportionally sized, comfortable, and well-equipped. The cuisine and service is spectacular.
I intend to prioritize future visits.

This conference gave me, a graduate student, an opportunity to discuss my current project with veteran researchers who lent me many valuable insights. It unquestionably propelled my work forward. It was an excellent conference.

The workshop was very informative. It brought together participants from different areas of analysis related to Banach lattices. This has led to new ideas and projects. In my case, the workshop has originated a work on a new paper.

Timur OikhbergResearch Associate Professor
Mathematics, University of Illinois at Urbana

I found this workshop very stimulating for my current research and some other topics I am familiar with. For example, I found new insights on convergence of power series due to the very informing talks of Gerard Buskes, which led to making immediate contact with the attending researchers Mark Roelands and Chris Schwanke. I also had academic discussions with Timur Oikhberg and Frederick Dashiell. I look forward to further contribute on those themes. Moreover, I also had the opportunity to meet some participants that could collaborate with me or otherwise help me in my career. Many thanks to the organizers.

I found this program fantastic from a variety of perspectives - the venue was great & that along with the organization structure facilitated lots of scientific interactions with the other workshop attendees. This has definitely stimulated a number of brewing ideas in my mind & concretely modified in a sizable manner work we are doing right now on scalable Bayesian algorithms for clustering.

This was a fantastic focus workshop on recent advances on Bayesian nonparametrics. It had a good composition of theory and applications. Talks were by leading researchers, especially younger ones. There were plenty of time to discuss.

This was a great workshop and an excellent opportunity to learn first hand about recent developments in Bayesian Nonparametrics from some of the leading researchers in the area.
The workshop provided a stimulating environment for discussions and inspired new ideas for future research.

The organizers put together a spectacular workshop. The well-structured schedule provided time for the (very well prepared) talks and discussion about the ideas raised in them. In all, a superb event. I am definitely interested in returning for future events.
Conferences such as this one that bring together researchers from ALL of North America, in addition to those from elsewhere in the world, do much to build an inclusive research community. Kudos to the organizers and to CMO-BIRS.

Steven MacEachern Professor and Chair
Statistics , Ohio State University

I think the workshop size, in terms of participants, and the scientific scope of the event were arranged perfectly, as they allowed fruitful inteactions that do not generally occur at bigger conferences or conferences with broader scopes. The program has been desinged masterfully, and the small numbers provide a great incentive for active personal participation and attendance to all presentations. Overall, I believe I have greatly benefitted from participating to the CMO-BIRS event on Bayesian nonparametric inference, and the impact on my future research work will certainly be positive.

Thank you very much for having invited me to this prestigious event. I learned very much and brought many new ideas to my head. I knew incredible people and the mathematical level was incredibly stimulating. It is a real pleasure and privilege that the BIRS had chosen the country I live for its events.

I think that my participation in the CMO-BIRS workshop will impact my current research. I got a fresh insight on a field that I am familiar with but not an expert. I also had the occasion to make new contacts I wouldn't have had otherwise.

Although proteins are linear macromolecules, the existence of cysteine bonds transform the topology of these linear molecules to that of embedded graphs in 3-space. At this conference I learned that the knots, links, theta curves and pierced lasso structures in proteins are closely related to protein function.

This workshop is fantastic. It contains a "mixed" (in a good way) group spanning from experimental materials scientists and physicists to mathematicians who deal with proofs, and everything interesting in between! Such a meeting is outside the realm of the standard scientific presentation circuit, and that is exactly makes CMO-BIRS special. Highlights for me: Joakim Anden's talk and Brian Green's talk. The topic of the former talk will inspire me to attempt to apply such methods to my own research. The topic of the latter contained work highly relevant to my own research.

Excellent workshop, wonderful site and perfect organisation. The format of bringing together an expert panel across two disciplines was extremely helpful for our field, very much along the lines that novel breakthroughs are more likely to happen at the boundaries between disciplines. The mixture of young and senior researchers was very well chosen and the quality of the talks was excellent.

The BIRS meeting had an important impact for me due to its relative size which allowed to follow in details all the recent progresses and to interact efficiently with most participants. The location is also very nice. This opportunuity has allowed me to set-up new perspectives in this field and to plan many future visit exchanges between my institute and institutes of other participants.

The conference was fantastic. It definitely stimulated my thinking and gave me several new ideas for my research. Fostering contact with others in my area of research and potential collaborators was especially valuable -- not to mention that Oaxaca is an amazing city!

The BIRS workshop on interactive simulation equipped me with a fresh perspective on immersed B-spline methods in finite element analysis. I have been intrigued with these methods for quite some time, and it always seemed to me that they offered considerable promise. Until the BIRS workshop in Oaxaca two weeks ago, I had become quite discouraged by the lack of current research in this area. Thankfully, the workshop introduced me to three very interesting people who are actively pursuing these methods, and my faith has been fully restored. I am now contemplating a pilot project to explore their use on industrial problems, something I would not have considered except for this workshop.

The workshop gave me a very good perspective on current work in the area of computational geometry. It was a very nice opportunity to present my current work and get interesting feedback from people both in academia and industry, which was very valuable.

The workshop at CMO-BIRS in Oaxaca offered a wonderful location to meet scientists from different areas. As I am in the transition from the PhD studies to a following activity, the mixture of academic and industrial backgrounds allowed me to collect experiences from different areas. Additionally, I could establish contacts there which might help for my future career. The size of the workshop with about 30 people even encouraged 1-on-1 discussions to all participants and everybody knew each others reasearch topics and problems.
From the perspective of a researcher with a focus on the basics of the fundamental methods (FEM,...), it was very impressive to see their possibilities in an applied area as the computer graphics.

What I think was unique about this workshop compared to other workshops I have attended was that this workshop was quite successful in presenting the scientific challenges within the theme of the workshop (geometric modeling and computer graphics in a broad sense) from both academic and industry perspective. Most workshops have a similar structure in terms of a small number of participants and having people from both industry/nonprofit and academia but not many of them can provide an interesting and engaging interaction between both communities. I think I would attribute this success to both the choice of the participant as well as the style of the talks. The talks were longer than normal conference talks, interactive, and mostly targeted to "introducing what I do"!
I really enjoyed the talks that were targeted to the introduction of the tools. Not only I learned about one(s) that I was not aware of (like SOFA), it also gave me a new perspective on the one(s) I use very often like CGAL. It was interesting for me to hear that the teams working on these tools actually do want to hear challenges their users have.

Mahsa MirzargarAssistant Professor
Department of Computer Science, University of Miami

This workshop was remarkable due to its blend of participants from different branches of academia, research labs and industry who share the common goal of improving the interface between geometry and computation for physical simulation.
I specifically learned about resources in the form of new open-source software implementations of recent and new algorithms, and I obtained a deeper insight into the factors that are important to engineers and animators in physical simulation. In my upcoming sabbatical I plan to visit some of the researchers the workshop introduced me to.
Due to the size the workshop, the length and depth of discussions was better than in larger North American and European workshop settings.

With almost 40 talks, this was a very successful workshop to catch a state-of-the-art snapshot of the area. Ideas for new research projects abounded. There were ample of networking opportunities and I now look forward to the accompanying conference proceedings!

It was an amazing workshop. A high level scientific event with the participation of recognized researchers in the field of Splitting Algorithms, Modern Operator Theory, and Applications. It was also an excellent opportunity to start collaborations with other researchers. The organizers did an excellent job! I am very happy to have participated in this workshop and I am looking forward to another event like this one! Thank you very much for all the support.

This was a really excellent event in a beautiful location. With talks from top speakers in the field as well as younger researchers I gained new insights, ideas and contacts. The informal format (e.g. chalk talks) and small size allowed much more discussion and exchange of ideas. Great fun!

I would like to report that our workshop was running very successfully. Many participants including me think that this is the most productive workshop ever. We invited excellent speakers with a good variety in terms of research areas, ages and nations. Everybody learned a lot of new things and got many new ideas. Some research collaborations were created during the workshop. We were also having a very pleasant time in Oaxaca, talking, eating, and staying together in five days.
I think Oaxaca is an ideal place for holding research workshops, which is an interesting city without too many distractions. All participants are very grateful for CMO accommodating our workshop.

Jiguo CaoDepartment of Statistics and Actuarial Science, Simon Fraser University

The Workshops held in CMO have been very fruitful to me. The discussion and debates about recent developments and open problems in the analysis of functional data were very interesting. As a result, I found many possible ideas that could impact my current and future research lines.

Carolina Euan Ph.D
Statistics, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

Excellent workshop! Definitely a must for anyone interested in strong theoretical foundations with applications to real and complex datasets by means of efficient computational tools. Of course, the new light in my research have not been possible without the clear presentations of my new colleagues. Meeting one of the founders of functional data analysis and celebrating his birthday was also very emotive for me. No words can express that emotion. This workshop has definitely marked a career path in my research. I am completely grateful to the organizers!

There is currently a large, but unnatural chasm between statistics and applied math. As an applied mathematician this workshop was invaluable for learning what is going on in a crucial area of statistics. I learned so many valuable techniques that I can put into effect almost immediately.

This workshop was great. We got to discuss different tools for state-space models, met people using different tools for relatively similar problems. I have already started to try some new tools with the help of some of the participants. I believe that many new avenues of collaboration have been established.

My participation in the workshop has been a real impact in my current research. I have had the opportunity to continue with work that I started approximately one year before during a research visit of one of the participants of the workshop in my University... that was so nice!!!. Also I created new connections related with my current research.
Moreover, I really enjoyed the workshop. Thanks a lot to the organizers Eugenia, Dimitri and Egon for inviting me.

The workshop turned out to be a great academic experience. The organizers did a fantastic job. A well balanced schedule of 30m talks with working time in small groups on various problems proposed and chosen during the first day. The outcome was that we learned a lot about different ways of thinking coming from various backgrounds. For students and young researchers it was stimulating and fruitful in the sense that they got to know many mathematicians in working-mode. Personally, I enjoyed it immensely and left with new problems and insights, and very optimistic for the future of the young mathematicians in the field.

During the workshop several open questions were posed. I discussed some of them with other participants, particularly those questions that are closer with my recent research. It was useful to me to see that other people are interested in these topics, and I learned about their intentions of making progress on them. In the future it will be easier to me to find people with whom to collaborate in such topics.
On the other hand, I joined a research group on a topic that is new to me, and while doing so I learned a lot about it. This was a good opportunity to attack a problem in a complete new topic for me, surrounded by people that know better that topic and were able to guide me through it.
This workshop was also very good for my PhD student. He had the opportunity to talk to leaders of the area about his PhD problem. Moreover, he had a great experience on attacking a problem together with well-known researchers from other parts of the world. I hope that this will be very helpful when looking for a post-doctoral fellowship for him when he finishes his PhD.

This workshop has opened my eyes on the ongoing interests in atomic and condensed matter physics in solving numerically, real time propagation of the Dirac equation, laser interactions involving the singular Coulomb potential, and gauge-invariant method of solving synthetic gauge problems. Since I am currently developing methods of removing the Coulomb singularity from path-integral-Monte-Carlo simulations, this gives me further impetus for developing Coulomb algorithms for solving real-time propagation problems. This workshop has inspired me to develop splitting spectral methods for solving synthetic gauge problems, which are of increasing importance in many sub-fields of physics. Rarely have I gained so many new ideas in a single workshop and get to know so many others that I can potentially collaborate.

I have attended many workshops at BIRS. The Thirty Years of Floer Theory for 3-Manifolds
workshop was my first trip to CMO. The logistics were very smooth.
The scientific content of the workshop and workshop schedule were outstanding. There were many stimulating talks as well as two of the best problem sessions I have attended in years. The schedule provided the right mix between informal interaction time and formal presentations.
To me good problems (interesting, open and with a reasonable chance to make progress) are some of the most valuable tools for generating research. There is a positive feedback effect where a good problem naturally leads to other good problems. The problem sessions generated a list of more than 30 problems. Very few were old stand-by questions that were well known. I think the concentration of researchers in the same area and the size of the workshop both contributed to the success of these sessions.
I am excited to bring some of these problems back to my university where I have an enthusiastic second year graduate student. The problems will also strengthen my grant proposals this Fall. The list could not have come at a better time for me.
Another positive benefit from attending workshops is the interaction with other researchers
in the field. I will likely start a new collaborative project with another participant from the workshop last week.
Let me make a special thank you to the work that you and your staff do. I spent three years on the directorate at MSRI and so have some idea of the administrative work that takes place in the background.
I greatly appreciate all you and your staff do for the mathematical community.

I come back from CMO absolutely inspired. I now have a promising idea to solve a topology problem that I have been working on for 30 years. I could easily take a sabbatical to explore all of the new ideas that I have after these two workshops. These workshops will fuel my research program for the next few years.

I recently participated in the CMO workshop "Thirty Years of Floer Theory for 3-Manifolds" and found the experience rewarding professionally. Besides the excellence and breadth of the talks on offer, the schedule permitted lots of time for both networking and work with collaborators.

Participating in the workshop "Analysis of Dislocation Models for Crystal Defects" was a very positive experience.
I had the possibility of presenting my research on this topic and, most importantly, to interact with the other participants and fellow researchers to exchange ideas.
The workshop brought together two communities which study the problem using different techniques, so it was very interesting to familiarize a bit with that the others do.
I find the BIRS/CMO format successful for interconnecting scientists and to discuss the recent trends of research topics.

This was one of the most useful conferences that I attended in several years. The choice of the speakers was superb, the general organization was great, and the facility at Oaxaca was fantastic. I want to come there again!

The level of the talks were wonderful and for me it was an opportunity to know several reseachers and their contributions. The organization (including hotel, facilities and meals) of the event was fantastic and Oaxaca is a very nice city to visit. Many thanks to Ramon Plaza, Jared Bronski and Peter Miller for the nice meeting! Waiting for the next conference!

Workshop like this can really kick-start young mathematician's career. Excellent organization, excellent choice of speakers bringing together experts from several close but separate mathematical areas (in this case set-theory, dynamics, ergodic theory and geometric group theory). As a mathematician working and educating young mathematicians in Mexico I truly appreciate the strength of the mathematical culture CMO brings.

It is a very good idea to have multidisciplinary workshops, like this one. It is a very good opportunity to meet people from other similar areas and learn new stuff.
The workshop could potentially have impact in my students when choosing a place for a post doc.
It was very useful meeting people working in Mexico.

During the conference I had the chance to learn new notions and approaches. The interactions with the other participants have also been very fruitful. It was really useful to get to know a lot of people working on topics related to mine and their research. Moreover from the different interactions I came out also with new concrete ideas for my research that I will develop in the next months.

The CMO-BIRS workshop was an outstanding event. It helped me to meet with current collaborators and discuss about the topics of the conference, and it also brought to my attention new ideas, and different approaches for some of the problems I am currently working on. It definitely gave me a fresh insight on the quantization procedure for topological field theories and its connection with derived algebraic geometry and algebraic quantum field theories.
As I will be in the job market in the near future, it also helped me to interact with various faculty members, who gave me valuable advice for the upcoming tenure-track hunt.
I also had the opportunity to learn different aspects of field theory from a different perspective, and I am very grateful to the organizers for that. I had several fruitful discussions with colleagues from different areas of research and it helped me a lot to have a better understanding of the current state of the field.

This event was a great opportunity to get a finger on the pulse of some of the more interesting new developments in my field. Bringing together a diverse community of researchers, particularly in the relaxed and comfortable environment in which we found ourselves, was a great way to foster informal and unstructured discussions about manifold research topics.
I myself was fortunate to have a number of very fruitful interactions with other researchers, including experts in my area, that have really helped clarify some of the trickier points of my current projects.

I was able to give a very short presentation of about my PhD research. One of the attendees - an expert on the subject - commented on some points that he thought were missing, this gave me the chance to discuss with him in more detail and I now have some interesting new ideas for my research (plus, a new contact I wouldn't have made otherwsie). It was also an opportunity to see some people again, and discuss ideas that we already shared for a while. I think I can say we made some progress.

The workshop has been great for me, someone who has not studied the subjects discussed very deeply. I was able to learn a lot and get many new ideas which are even helpful for my other projects. And we started a new projects with several other young people.

I had a great time in Oaxaca. One benefit for me was starting a totally unexpected and new project with two of the other participants. It is on a topic I have not really worked on before, but we found a nicecommon ground. It certainly would not have happened without the workshop.

From a scientific point of view the workshop was a big success. Progress was made on several interesting and important problems. From a personal perspective, it was also invaluable. As a direct result of the workshop, I am involved in two projects that would certainly never have begun if it were not for the contacts and discussions made possible by the workshop. Many of the participants are people that I do not typically cross paths with, and it was very useful to be able to talk to them (both about the two projects I mentioned and also to gain insights on the broad topics of the workshop).

My participation certainly impacted my current research. I was able to start two new collaborations with a mix of people that includes some I have not had an opportunity to work with in the past. We were able to achieve some new results on one project that will hopefully result in a publication. On another project, we achieved additional insights and will continue to work toward new results. Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this workshop.

This workshop allowed us to focus on a series of problems in related areas (Commutative Algebra, Algebraic Geometry, Computational Algebra) and covered the state of the art in Ordinary and Symbolic Powers of ideals.
The organizers made a list of around 20 problems suggested by the the speakers and the participants. To solve these problems the participants formed teams. I was in a team (together with Susan Morey, Tai Ha, Kuei-Nuan Lin, Enrique Reyes) working on a new class of ideals monomial associated to digraphs (directed graphs) which lead us to start writing a joint paper.
As a consequence of the planning of this workshop (few talks, making lists of interesting problems to be discussed in teams), I am sure there will be several new theorems, papers, and new collaborations that will impact the areas of the workshop.

The workshop was very useful on several fronts. I very much hope to pursue some of the research directions I learned about at the workshop! I certainly learned a lot of things and got many new ideas for projects and directions.

My current research is in a field parallel to, although not directly related to, toric geometry. I consider myself very fortunate to have the opportunity to attend this workshop. From the talks of the participants, many of whom leaders in the field, I got a clear perspective of the subject's scope and methodology. It was indeed a pleasure to listen to geometers coming from outside one's own discipline.

This workshop allowed me to share the state of the knowledge with researchers from all over the world on the subjects I am working on, and to discover modern theories and ideas on the others. The interdisciplinary flavor of this particular workshop increased the opportunity for rich discussions and brings fresh air to my research ideas. Overall, Oaxaca is a very warm and colorful city, the conference venue is peaceful and beautiful and the Angel Inn hotel staff was extraordinarily welcoming.

I am a computer science researcher. Attending BIRS workshops is a great source of inspiration for me. I have a strong belief that exciting new research has great chances to happen at the junction between different domains. By fostering connections between mathematics and computer sciences, by favoring exchanges between researchers in a great environment, BIRS workshops are exactly the place where these cross-domain interactions are likely to happen. I had rich interactions with several colleagues, that are likely to become cooperation projects in a short future. After this workshop, I come back home with a load of new ideas / new directions for the new research group that I am going to create. It had also contacts with young researchers who may apply for a position in this new research group.

This workshop was perfectly organized. The place is perfect and well suited to let researchers be in the best conditions to work without any material worries. The place is quiet and propice to mathematical research.

This was a very interesting workshop which brought together a crowd of researchers which would have not assembled otherwise, I think. Personally, I met new people and have seen a lot of novel ideas. I have no doubt, the workshop brought about many fruitful interactions and eye-opening insights, including for myself.

This workshop gave me some new insights, especially on how the theory of optimal transport could be related to statistical inference. I think it is a very fruitful workshop, in which I had the opportunity to discuss with people from disciplines outside my field. Those discussions lead to new ideas and thinkings which I haven't realized before.

I was one of the leaders of the Spectral Geometry team, and prior to the workshop I was a bit nervous about whether our team would make progress on our problem and how the team dynamics would work. It turned out to be a wonderful week of stimulating mathematical discussions, close collaboration by our team to produce results, and networking and mentoring among all the participants. Our team is well on our way to producing a publication, and we are currently seeking ways to continue our work together. So the week clearly benefited both my research program and the programs of my teammates, but also served to help me feel connected to a community of women geometers. I can't remember the last time I had such a wonderful time at a mathematics workshop!

The workshop was extremely helpful for my research. For one, it was an opportunity to meet former or current collaborators. I have had a discussion with one participant with whom I have an ongoing project and we had the chance to discuss a problem that we are stuck with. To have the opportunity to discuss this in person was very helpful. Secondly, the workshop was an opportunity to learn about new and ongoing research from other colleagues and it was very inspiring in this regard. For instance, one presentation has lead to a new project idea for me that I have used for a PhD project proposal that I submitted yesterday. Finally, I also had the opportunity to discuss with a number of further participants their particular questions that are related to my own research and I have gained new insights into their research in this way too. It was very motivating to see how my research ideas influence other research projects that I was not even aware of.

I met new people doing research in topics connected to my interests, but coming from different areas of logics and mathematics in general. This interaction was very interesting and will probably end up in new collaborations. The meeting at CMO-BIRS impacted my current research and gave me new ideas to continue my research.

It was really a very good workshop in the area of algorithmic randomness and its interaction with other areas like ergodic theory. Among interesting talks there were enough time to discussions and sessions on open problems. It was pleasant to listen about new results which are very close to my own research as well as about open problems. Some of open problems I consider as important and I will try to solve some of them.

The workshop enabled to:
- Trigger new cooperations with partners in Mexico and in the US
- Envisage job positions for one of my postdocs
- Have a different look at a problem I have been working on with the perspective of new results

My discussions with a colleague during the workshop influenced the final form of my last submitted paper. I had also the chance to meet a colleague from US whose work fits perfectly to a project that I am involved in. Future cooperation is planned. A new research idea came up during discussions on the connections of the subject of my talk and point-free topology.

The conference site in Oaxaca is a very comfortable hotel, with just the right capacity for a group about 50 people. The conference program was extremely successful. This added to a perfect weather and cuisine made for one of the best conference experiences I have had.

Krzysztof BogdanDepartment of Pure and Applied Mathematics, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology

I am very happy and satisfied of my participation to the workshop from many points of view. I had the chance of meeting mathematicians from around the world, with whom I shared subjects of interest. I had also the possibility of seeing some new research in some fields, that even though are not my principle field of study, were nevertheless very interesting. On top of that, I had very pleasent discussions, both scientific and "job oriented".

The workshop on Stable Processes was very stimulating for me. It gave the opportunity of discussing with Piotr Grazyc and Tomasz Zac on their ongoing work on inversions of diffusions and related subjects. It also allowed me to see the work that is being done in other directions different from those we are working on in Mexico. Specially Bañuelos and Rosinski treated very interesting subjects, as well as Chen with whom I had the occasion of discussing during the workshop. The general ambiance was great and I saw all the participants taking part in many mathematical discussions. I thank you for the various opportunities I have had during this year to attend CMO workshops in probability.

The workshop had a great impact in my research. It allowed me to meet with some of my collaborators and advance in some works in progress, it allowed me also to meet other specialists in the field and enlarging my research network, and to start new projects. In particular, I started a collaboration with a potential postdoc. I participated in the planning of some future meetings either in Mexico or abroad.

I really enjoyed my stay at CMO. The area is very beautiful and the conference was very interesting. This was the first time in my scientific life that I attended all talks of the conference! All talks were really interesting and broaden my view at the subject.
During the conference I also had several interesting discussions about this part of mathematics I am interested in. Especially fruitful were conversations with professor M.E. Caballero, because it turned out that she is also interested in problems I try to solve. During the month after the conference we continued our discussions using e-mails.
I started my talk in Oaxaca expressing my gratitude to all the organizers of this conference.

I came to this workshop to learn more about "sparse interpolation". It was a good idea since at the end of the week I could start a collaboration with B. Mourrain on showing how this problem could be viewed as a "super resolution" problem for which specialized methods are available and coule be an alternative to Prony's method. We intend to write a paper to develop this idea further.

This was a great collection of people actively doing interesting work in this area, including some very senior people and an excellent selection of very creative young people. It was a privilege to hear about so many recent results from the authors and to get such a good overview of where the field is.

It was a great meeting, we had great lectures of rather fresh exciting results. The environment was friendly and good conversations and discussions arose. I myself started some interesting discussions with 2 people that could lead to new research. Last, but not least, Oaxaca, CMO, and their staff were wonderful to us.

I am very happy! The Workshop opened in me a rainbow of new ideas. Many of them do not have an immediate application on my research, but surely in the future I will find the bridges. The CMO is a very nice place and I want to say:
THANK YOU for giving me the opportunity of participate in the Workshop.
Thanks to the Organizing Committee too.

This workshop was undoubtedly useful for my work. There were some very interesting presentations, the results of which I will try to use in my further studies. I have discussed with the other participants a lot of interesting topics and I hope that the results of these discussions, we will make at least two joint projects.

The talks and the environment for discussions were phenomenal, I certainly learned a lot this past week. I kept a list of problems and/or research directions motivated by talks in the workshop, and by the end I had a list over 10 strong! Looking forward to another opportunity to attend a workshop in CMO.

The workshop was fantastic with talks that were of the highest possible quality. The workshop gave me the opportunity to learn more about deep learning and I truly appreciated the healthy scientific discussions concerning recent achievements in this field. There were a lot of young participants, who presented spectacular works and contributed many new ideas. It is just wonderful to belong to a field full of vitality, mostly driven by the new generation.

This workshop gave me the opportunity to showcase my most recent research, which was well-liked by the community. In addition, I was very honoured to attend this event alongside most of the most relevant researchers in my area, and get a fresh perspective on their most recent work. I also shared some of my research problems with several attendees, so it is conceivable that in the long run some new collaborations arise from this workshop.

The workshop gave me the opportunity to meet experts on my field of research, to discuss about our current works and to share our different point of view in related topics. Certainly, these discussions will lead to new projects and future discussions.
It was moreover a great occasion to present my previous work to the mathematical community working in related topics.

I found this workshop very useful and stimulating for my research. The workshop was masterfully organized, both in terms of number of talks, choice of topics, and quality of the lectures. It is certainly going to impact my research.

I found this workshop to be enjoyable, informative and stimulating. The hotel was comfortable and the staff extremely helpful. The scientific organizers had chosen a nice mix of people. One of my students also attended the meeting, and benefited tremendously from it.

The workshop was very enlightening, although not directly applicable to my current research field, the problems in crowdsourcing are gaining traction and theoretical applications of network structure to solve or produce HITs and tasks are a possibility in the horizon. My hope is to include ore aspect of network structure as determining of their function, to eventually answer questions that move the inclusion of crowds as black boxes to tools with known potentialities. In this sense, the proposed task compiler for crowds maybe an initial step.
Therefore, my participation in this workshop has given me a new understanding of this potential application of control theory approach to networks.

Thanks to CMO-BIRS and the organizers for the great atmosphere for scientific interactions. I got to make several new contacts I wouldn't have made otherwise, and also caught up with colleagues I hadn't interacted with for a while.

The workshop was very insightful since I was able to learn a lot about gender issues in mathematics, also by listening to the experiences of the other participants of the workshop. I intend to apply many things I learned in my home university and in my country, in order to help in the promotion of women in mathematics.

Thank you to the organizers of this workshop. I was happy to learn a bit about the career of many established women in mathematics, information I hope to use as a guide now that I am in the job market while about to finish my first postdoctoral position. Moreover, I had the opportunity to hear about research and travel grants for latino-american women, that I will possibly apply for. And I was excited to hear about the work of several participants of the conference, whose research interests and/or outreach activities overlap mine.

CMO-BIRS workshop has a very positive impact on my life. It marks the beginning of a new phase in my personal development.
I have learned a lot about barriers to gender equality all over the world and, in particular, in Latin American countries. During the workshop we discussed about the complex challenges our society face and consequently, makes me think about many things we can do in Argentina. As my students are also interested in gender equality, I hope we can do a good work in our university.
The workshop has given me the opportunity of knowing very interesting women. I have many new contacts and Facebook friends.
In my research area as mathematician, the exchange of ideas and information with women from different countries was very fruitful. In particular, I will intend to work in collaboration with Victoria Hernandez from Cuba. We will study wave propagation in plate structures with finite element methods.
I am very grateful to CMO-BIRS for giving the opportunity to participate in this women meeting.

I would like to thank you for this beauty conference and I really liked it a lot. The level of the presentation was very good, the womans were amazing prepared and it was nice to see this intercontinental and international cooperation of womans in math. It was a pleasure for me to meet these ladies, also to see the organisation site of the conference and meet new mathematicions but also friends.

Our workshop on modular categories brought together most of the major figures working on the subject today. They were drawn from a wide variety of mathematical subfields so many different perspectives on the current trends in this research area were presented. My time at CMO was very productive; I personally was able to resolve some questions relevant to my current research, and I learned about some new possibilities for applications to ongoing work on some classification problems.

Henry TuckerPostdoctoral Fellow
Mathematics, University of California, San Diego

This conference was very engaging. I can tell that the organizers made a great effort to make sure that each member of the wide audience gained something from many of the talks. For instance, there were a good number of "Introduction to..." talks as well as a nice distribution of lecture topics at the conference. The research talks were also very interesting and I gained much from the conversations with participants between talks. Moreover, the facilities and location are absolutely fantastic-- the staff is friendly and resourceful and Oaxaca is lovely. I really enjoyed the organized tour to Mitla during the Wednesday afternoon break. In short, I learned a significant amount of mathematics, met (and re-met) a great group of mathematicians, and would definitely go to the next one if there is an opportunity to do so.

I have gained a lot from the communications with all the attendees. I like the arrangement of the talks. The participants have lots of time for questions and lots of break time for discussion. I have learnt many new things and specially have new ideas for some problems. Hope to have some joint papers with some of the participants.

Falai ChenProfessor
Mathematics, University of Science and Technology of China

I had a great time at the CMO-BIRS event of last week. The workshop was very well organized, a lot of people I have common interests with, a lot of discussions, definitely new collaborations have started there as well as continuing academic connections.
I am definitely looking forward to the next time I get an invitation to one of these events!

This workshop was interesting because there was a mix of different communities, so I find that all participants learned something new. I think it was particularly helpful for young participants, but I also got interesting insight that I expect will help me end a current project which still misses some proofs. The organizers did an excellent job.

The workshop was well-organized and efficiently run. I met many researchers whom I did not formerly know, and learned a lot about new topics. I was also able to discuss current research interests with many colleagues and gain new insights on problems that I have been working on for a long time. Overall, this was an extremely beneficial, productive, and enjoyable workshop.

I really enjoyed the workshop:
- the talks were well prepared, clear and interesting,
- they covered a large scope from effective algebraic geometry to computer aided design an engineering,
- we had nice discussions in a splendid place,
- with another participant, we decided to start a new research project,
- another participant will visit my place next year,
- I was happy to meet several Mexican mathematicians.

The workshop proposes an excellent chance for us to communicate our recent progress.
Based on the discussions, we make some important improvements on our topic.
I also glad to meet some famous expert in the workshop.

This workshop offered me the opportunity to meet researchers that I already knew and discuss with them about open issues related to my ongoing research projects. It also gave me the opportunity to know new members of the scientific community and have with them fruitful exchanges of ideas.

It was a wonderful workshop with very well selected researchers in this field.
I really enjoyed all talks and scientific discussion.
I am particularly happy as I could have intensive discussion with some researchers whom I knew only by their papers.
The participation impacted my current research in a very good sense. I learned many new mathematical techniques, some of which will be readily applied to one of my current research.
The size of workshop (number of people) was also quite good to have active discussion.
I am very grateful to the organizers for this wonderful workshop.

My participation in the CMO-BIRS workshop 'Random Structures in High Dimensions' had a tangible impact on my current research. Thanks particularly to discussions with some of the other participants, I gained new insight that resulted in the start of a new research project.

It was a beautiful workshop.
There were relatively wide ranges of lectures and I could update recent developments in the research fields.
I could discuss my on-going joint work with my collaborator during the workshop. Besides, I could discuss possible future collaborations with participants. It was also very nice to meet strong young mathematicians during the workshop.
I appreciate CMO-BIRS staffs for their nice organization and thank organizers for their beautiful scientific arrangements.

Lovely venue, lots of social fellowship at the dinners. A very good place to make new friends and explore one-to-one discussions of the future of our subject. Great trips to the surrounding countryside. Very full schedule of talks. I learned a lot and feel that I also contributed to the subject in our very open, friendly wide ranging discussions.
This was a great set of people, from quite a wide variety of topics. The first day was all Bose-Einstein Condensation. The second day was on nonlocal nonlinear gradient flows modelling the spread of locusts, the evolution of crime wave, social behaviour, some swarming. You get the picture and you have the agenda. The point is that everyone went the extra miles needed to communicate their stories and a real sense of camaraderie and mutual respect emerged. I could see that my planned talk was not in line with the first few days, so on the fourth day I gave a completely new talk based on my discussions during the first two days with my new friends about what they thought were the new directions in their fields. Fortunately, I had some background for this new endeavour and my talk went OK. In any case, I was inspired by the spirit of communication and friendship which kept emerging throughout this workshop. Very rare, in my experience, to find such a simpatico group of people at a workshop, so that even though the topics were quite varied the workshop did not break into isolated factions.

One of the best workshops that I have attended so far. It brought together many of the world's leading senior galaxy formation theorists, in addition to promising young researchers and a few observers to "keep us honest." One of the best aspects was the large amount of discussion, both during the ample time allocated specifically for discussion and during the talks. The workshop was characterized by intense yet polite debate about many pressing issues. The discourse was quite technical at times (regarding e.g. concerns about numerical resolution of hydrodynamical simulations); for me, this technical discussion was highly informative. There were also very interesting "philosophical" conversations that caused me to step back and think more deeply about the way in which I do science. I found the skeptical nature of the discussion very refreshing, and it was a welcome change from the typical mode of simulation results being presented and received uncritically. I came away with a deeper, more nuanced understanding about galaxy formation simulations and an awareness of potential problems that I need to think about further.
The workshop venue lends itself well to informal discussions over meals, during the tour of Monte Albán and sometimes late into the evening. These were enriching and beneficial in a general sense. Moreover, these interactions sparked a new research project: I am now working with one of the other participants to compare the results of my hydrodynamical simulations with his observations. Although he is already a collaborator, this particular project would likely not have been initiated had we not spent time together at the CMO-BIRS workshop.
Overall, I commend the organizers for their excellent workshop!

1) The workshop was extremely helpful for my research. As an observer, I do not have many opportunities to speak with the leading simulators in the field. The workshop provided the perfect opportunity to do this. I am now actively working on new projects as a result of this conference.
2) In addition, I felt that the size of the workshop, and the several discussions that were initiated between talks was ideal to maximize scientific input.

The workshop was a fantastic experience. The setting and format were perfect for a targeted scientific workshop with ample time for both presentations of new results and discussion of challenges our field faces. The particular focus on stellar and Active Galactic Nuclei feedback is one such challenge and having key world experts and young researchers in this area in the environment of BIRS was very productive.

Not only was the conference location amazing, both from the cultural and convenience point of view, but also this conference was a great occasion to discover new aspects of inverse problems that are related to spectral geometry. This was certainly one of the best events that I attended.

The workshop presented a very interesting combination of topics and experts, and I learned several new things. The CMO workshops are a very welcome addition to the excellent tradition of BIRS conferences.

The workshop definitely had an impact on my current research. I had the opportunity to learn the problems in the area which my colleagues are studying. At the same time, new collaborations originated from my interaction with other participants.

It was a great opportunity to witness in just one event the most important subjects under recent research in the field. Directions of the field in the short run were clearly presented.
At the same time, it was nice to discuss with experts on our current research.

First of all I would like to sincerely thank CMO-BIRS team for all they have done for the “Black Holes' New Horizons” workshop. It was a very nice and stimulating workshop for me. We have fruitfully discussed frontier topics in black hole science, gaining new insights into the subject. The workshop has greatly motivated me to think about both new collaborations and new research projects. The warm and friendly atmosphere provided by the organizers and CMO-BIRS team enabled us to establish new contacts with participants from different parts of the world. Finally, I would like to extend my sincerest thanks to Valeri Frolov and Don Page for organizing such a great and successful event.

Since my main research field is complex geometry, I found the workshop at CMO very stimulating. In particular, some talks were presented using standard techniques in differential geometry and hence, I don't exclude the possibility of working on some of these topics (from the mathematical point of view) in a near future.

I enjoyed the workshop very much. The enjoyed meeting fellow scientists and exchanging views on Einstein's gravity, the organization was perfect, I was able to use the time for significant progress in my research and I enjoyed the unusual environment at Oaxaca.

Barak KolProfessor, Head of Physics Studies
Racah Institute of Physics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This was a wonderful workshop for me. I work in string theory. so it was very useful to meet with general relativists and learn about the tools they are currently using. The talks and discussions at BIRS have given me new avenues to explore in my own work on black holes in string theory.

The workshop was of considerable value to me, despite being able to attend for only two days because of health issues at home. As one of two observers surrounded by theorists, I was delighted at the clarity of the talks and their quality. Especially enriching were extensive private discussions with Bill Unruh on the classical Coulomb field, Terry Tomboulis on QFT, Ruth Gregory on tunneling and Marco Cavaglia on LIGO, all individuals who I met for the first time at the workshop. Each of the first three discussions were relevant and enlightening in relation to a theoretical problem I have been playing with for several years. It was a privilege to attend and participate, and to consider with experts the deepest problem in the physical sciences. The venue was outstanding.

I want to thank Valeri Frolov and Don Page for the excellent school organization. The event fulfilled my expectations, help me to update my knowledge and let me learn more about the physics of black holes. I could interact with researchers of high prestige in the world as well as learn new research projects and start collaborations with other institutions. Thermodynamics of black holes will be my new research topic. Thanks everybody who made possible this kind of events. Thank you very much for the opportunity

The workshop had a direct impact on my current research. Some of the prominent workers in the field were there and this direct interaction helped clarify a number of issues and thus directly advance my current project. In addition, a visit and a potential new collaboration were arranged. The workshop also provided the opportunity to explore with some of the participants the possibility of another conference on related topics.
In addition, meeting for the first time in person some workers in adjacent areas of research was very beneficial and enjoyable. Overall, this workshop proved very fruitful for my current research.

The workshop was wonderful. The quality of the lectures was very high. I thought that four lectures per day was about right. I liked that there were a number of young people giving lectures. I also had ample time to continue a collaboration with one other participant and really delve deeply into another in a collaboration with two others. In fact all three of us felt that we made significant progress on the problem. Overall it was one of the best conferences I have ever gone to in a long career.

The CMO-BIRS workshop has an important impact on my current research: first I was able to learn new results (not yet published) from colleagues from around the world and second I could meet my collaborators to continue working in our projects and develop new directions. Given that in the conference there was a well-balanced combination of young and senior researchers fresh insight and perspective was a common denominator on my interactions with my colleagues. Moreover, new collaborations originated during the workshop. The location was just perfect and everything went on smoothly.

I loved the workshop. There were several outstanding talks with very original ideas; papers would appear on arXive only in many months, so it was an exceptional opportunity to learn the news long before getting the texts.
It was also an opportunity for me to work with several collaborators from other countries in person and not by e-mail or Skype, which is much more efficient.
It was also an incredible opportunity to ask certain narrow questions to the experts in the corresponding areas and to give fast and comprehensive explanations.
I also used this opportunity to discuss editorial questions and organization of further conferences with my colleagues.
The two PhD students of whom I am taking care directly or indirectly seemed to be extremely happy to participate in the conference: they gained a lot from direct contacts with experts.

The workshop was a really wonderful occasion to get together with several collaborators, and listen to extremely relevant work in the field. The workshop was masterfully organized, both in terms of number of talks, choice of topics, and quality of the lectures. It is certainly going to impact my research. I had the chance to discuss rather new projects with two distinct sets of collaborators.

My research has profited a lot from the workshop.
I am involved in two projects with coauthors who I had the chance to meet during the workshop.
In the first project, we discussed a new idea and then computed most cases of a classification showing up. Both of us were needed in the discussion and in the computations, and it would have been impossible to reach this far by email or skype.
Also the second project moved into a new direction where it would not have ended up hadn't we met.
The talks gave me new ideas for projects.
My Postdoc is likely to apply for a tenure track position at a colleague's place who we met at CMO.
The conference was wonderful, very well organized (thanks to the organizers!), with great talks and enough time for discussions.
Thank you BIRS!

The workshop was quite valuable for me, and my students, postdocs, and collaborators. In one collaboration, we seem to have solved a significant open problem during our stay in Oaxaca, which will be a significant step forward in our ongoing work together. I also started a new and quite promising project with one of the other organizers. One of my former students received a serious inquiry about a potential permanent job from one of the senior participants, and I identified two interesting junior participants as potential future postdoc hires in the next couple of years.

Hector Hugo Corrales Sanchez Postdoctoral research
Mathematics, Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute

The workshop gave me the opportunity to meet some great experts in a very exciting area, which shared with me their knowledge and some interesting references.
I have got some great ideas about the subject, and discovered new connections with other fields of my interest, like matroid theory.
I am so grateful to have had such opportunity.

I have already begun two research projects stemming from my participation in the Sandpile Groups workshop. One of these is a large-scale collaboration with about twelve other mathematicians from Canada, the USA and Mexico, on a topic I learned about for the first time at the workshop. The other project combines a long-standing research direction of mine with ideas from an excellent talk given by another participant (M. Chan). I think the workshop was a great success for myself and many other participants, and I am very grateful to the workshop organizers and CMO-BIRS staff for making it possible.

This was a most enjoyable cross-disciplinary meeting. The organisation of the conference and the facilities provided -- accommodation, food, seminar rooms -- were excellent. Furthermore, the size of the meeting was just right, in order to have talks of a good length and still have plenty of time for discussion.

The meeting was excellent in every regard. Very useful from a scientific point of view, and in a very pleasant environment that fostered in-depth discussion and collaboration. The meeting size of about 35 participants was just about ideal.

This workshop gave me an up-close overview of the state of the art in the field. The relaxed setting, small number of participants, as well as the schedule which allowed for lots of interaction allowed me to ask lots of questions and have informative discussions. While I've initiated some discussions with a couple participants, I'm not sure at present whether these discussions would lead to new results.

It was a fruitful and intense workshop, not only did I meet new researchers from the US and Canada, but some that I hadn't met before from my own country. The format of a selected number of participants motivated a more regular, concentrated, and fluent communication on the topics of interest. I hope the research projects discussed with new and old acquaintances in the workshop will results in future successful collaborations.

The workshop has been exciting by an expcetional scientific level of all its participants. The choice of the topic and attendants have been great. The two organizers have done a wonderfull job puting together such a number of specialists in Discrete Optimization.

I enjoyed the workshop very much. The organization was terrific and the format was very stimulating. I was able to discuss about my research with some colleagues and was given some ideas for improving it. I also learned about some new areas I would be interested to pursue in the future. The contacts I made were very valuable in this sense. I met new people, and shared some laughs too.

It was a wonderful opportunity to make new contacts with people in related areas of research. During the spare time, I had opportunity to learn about some interesting open problems in computational complexity and approximation algorithms.

This was the best workshop that I have attended in many years. In part this was due to the single focus and the limited number of attendees. Moreover, the success is also due to the warm staff at the conference site in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Great idea. Great execution. You gather a group of experts from around the world. Bring them to a lovely (and isolated) location for a week and have them present their research work with no distractions -- which then generates quality and detailed feedback from colleagues. You meet to collaborators and are inspired to work on new projects. Indeed, this was time very well spent and I would definitely consider doing this again.

I am very satisfied with having attended this workshop. As a newcomer to harmonic analysis I am very glad to have attended several talks which got me closer to relevant ideas in the area. I also had very productive discussions with Professors Lanzani, Harrington and McNeal about strong and uniform pseudoconvexity in several variables that will help me understand more deeply the same concept in infinite dimensions, specially in the non-smooth setting, as I have been investigating recently. I also had a chance to discuss job prospects with Loredana Lanzani, Jeff McNeal, Sonmez Sahutoglu and Yunus Zeytuncu. Thanks a lot to the organizers, especially Andrew Raich that was always available to help it go smoothly.

I had great time in Oaxaca. I listened to excellent talks and worked with my collaborators. I learned new techniques and new questions that other mathematicians are trying to answer. I already have multiple project ideas that I am eager to start working on. I will definitely remember this workshop throughout my career.

Thank you to the organizers!
It was a really productive workshop. Due to the short time we only obtain some small new results, but we established some collaboration that hopefully will produce even more important results.

My time allowed for substantial collaboration on an on-going project - an opportunity that is very valuable given a distracting daily schedule. Significant advances were achieved that would not have been otherwise.

Matthew BallardAssistant Professor
Department of Mathematics, University of South Carolina

The workshop has brought together people from different areas like representation theory, algebraic geometry (singularities) and matrix factorizations to discuss interactions between these fields. This has been very fruitful. I have learnt a lot about connections of my current research with other recent developments. It was very useful for me to meet my collaborator A.Takahashi to discuss our ongoing projects. There have been some questions arising in our common research which I presented at the end of my talk and where we needed help from experts of the other fields. This stimulated further discussions on these topics and gave me new insight in these problems. I noticed that some people picked up these questions and discussed them during the workshop. This might lead to further progress.

I had a wonderful experience in Oaxaca at CMO! The conference was excellent, the staff were friendly and helpful and the food was delicious! The CMO also offered me an opportunity to forward my research program with current collaborators and discuss new ideas with other researchers. All in all, I had a great time and would definitely love to come again.

Rosa-Maria Miro-Roig Prof. Dr.
Facultat de Matemàtiques, University of Barcelona

The theme of the workshop really fits my research area, so I learned a lot, getting new insights from the presentations in the workshop. Some things I have learned are very useful to my ongoing research projects. In addition, it is very stimulating to discuss possible new projects with participants. We strongly hope that we will make some future collaborations from this workshop. I thank the organizers to have invited me for such a wonderful workshop.

Knowing that we had a fully organised and funded workshop coming up at CMO-BIRS actually allowed us to form a cohesive collaboration from all the participants even before arriving in Oaxaca. The time together in Oaxaca then meant that the workshop itself gave us the opportunity to make a lot of progress on a large project together. The end result will be a series of nine papers co-authored by all of the attendees, to be submitted within a year of the workshop. The fantastic support of Silvia and her team meant that we could really focus on doing that science rather than spending time and effort ensuring that the workshop ran properly.

It was he first time at CMO-BIRS for me, and it was a great experience! The place was wonderful, to stay, to work and to discuss with colleagues. I had the opportunity to speak with many people and to learn new interesting facts. I also learned that the main problem I was working on had been solved recently… Well, this is not a very nice thing, but it did not depress me, instead it stimulated me to continue to work on the subject.

Andrea ColesantiProfessor
Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Florence

This conference was a wonderful! I had an opportunity to speak to many people in my area of research to discuss several problems I am currently working on. The organization of the meeting was perfect. The talks were very interesting.
Beautiful place and amazing conference!
Many thanks to organizers for inviting me.

It was a very good conference with very interesting
talks. A big number of young people gave very good talks.
The conditions for the conference were very good,
the staff at the hotel was extremely helpful, the waiters
went out of their way to accommodate us.

I would like to strongly thank you because I really enjoyed my stay at CMO last week. Moreover I found the workshop very interesting and really productive.
Altogether, I would love to have the opportunity to be back there in the future!

I enjoyed my stay at CMO in several ways and found the workshop
useful for my future research. I wish to extend a special thank to
Florin Diacu, Jaume Llibre and Ernesto Perez-Chavela for their really hard work to give us such an amazing week of maths.
Special thanks to all the people behind CMO-BIRS program, this is one of the best activities that I have seen.
I hope some day, to give back in a similar way, all the great experiences that I enjoyed during my time in Oaxaca.

We have really enjoyed our stay at CMO, the workshop was a big success, we had the participation of top researchers in our subject. The informal discussions and open problems sessions were great.
During our stay at CMO, I have started a couple of new research projects with different participants and almost finished a paper which I have started more than one year ago with another one. I have also benefitted by the fact that two participants arrived one week earlier to México, and other two departed one week later, with this in my University, we have had four excellent visiting professors who contributed with talks and interesting discussions with our students. Personally I have progressed a lot in my research projects with them.
Summarizing, I consider that CMO-BIRS is helping in the development of the Mexican Mathematical Society and in the formation and stimulation of our students.
I really appreciate the opportunity to organize this workshop.

The workshop was absolutely great! The location was extremely pleasant and the lectures as well as the discussion about open problems were amazingly fruitful. It was for me the starting point of new collaborations as well as of at least two new research projects. It was an excellent conference with many interesting talks, and is an excellent opportunity for experts to communicate with each other. The atmosphere for top research was outstanding. Almost everybody was impressed by the organization and helpfulness of the staff and by the quality of meals.

The conference was very well organized. The registration process, the accommodation, and the food was first class.
It was nice to see that my prior work was referenced by several speakers. The contact with these speakers has encouraged me to continue working on the N-body problem despite the fact that I am retired. It appears that interest in celestial mechanics has diminished in the USA, but it was encouraging to see that around the world there are still vigorous research groups in this area.

My current research was impacted after I attended the CMO-BIRS workshop. A new project will start soon. I will recruit an undergraduate as research assistant to work on one problem that I learnt from the workshop. There is something new I can ask my student to investigate. I will collaborate with other professors to test whether our variational method with SPBC can be used to study Vortex problem. The CMO-BIRS workshop is the most fruitful conference I ever attended.

The workshop organization, schedule, hospitality and accommodation were all first class. Thank you to all our hosts from Casa Matemática Oaxaca!
The workshop's main scientific topic was well defined and clearly communicated to all workshop participants. For me personally our work in plenary sessions and in groups was an excellent learning experience. At the same time, with their choice of plenary speakers, the workshop organizers were able to introduce an array of research outcomes, ideas and activities that enhanced everyone's experience beyond the workshop's principal focus.
Still, I think that the best part of the workshop were its participants. I would like to congratulate the workshop organizers on their choice of the scholars and practitioners who they invited to take part in the workshop. A diverse, but very communicative and knowledgeable group of math teachers, math education researchers, in addition to a few community members and administrators, all came together to learn and share their experiences on the topic of "Concept Study".

My participation in the CMO-BIRS workshop will impact my current research, in the sense that I will expand it including the idea of Concept Study. There are new collaborations with colleagues; we started writing a short paper with the ideas that emerged during the workshop.
The Concept Study idea will impact in my students, future mathematics teachers. This concept will help the to better grasp how a mathematics concept evolve through the school levels; something that they need to be aware as future teachers.

My participation in the CMO-BIRS workshop impact in my current research related to Wejën Kajën in Mathematics Education, a point of view that I develop from indigenous cultures (in particular Ayuujk culture in which one I come from). So, I have some new contacts and I hope to start new collaborations or papers. Thank you.

As a result of the workshop Concept Study - Profound Understanding of Teachers' Mathematics, I was able to make connections with people involved in Mathematics Education, mostly in Mexico. I have been working in collaboration with the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, UPN, (México) in projects related to mathematics teacher education. This workshop was just one step further in these collaborations which so far include the proceedings of a previous meeting, an edited book, and co-supervising students. From this workshop we will produce a proceeding compiling the insights of several groups that focused on different mathematical concepts essential for education, including: geometry, number systems, and equality. Such explorations were enhanced by perspectives of aboriginal scholars from Canada, US and Mexico. As a result, we are considering a new venue of research regarding aboriginal mathematical knowledge and its impact on mathematics and mathematics education. Prospective PhD students showed interest in conducting research in this topic.
Beyond my own benefit from this workshop, other people established connections that I am sure will afford benefits for mathematics teachers and students in Mexico. For instance, a group of young Mexican mathematicians who have a Cátedra CONACYT project in education had the opportunity to meet a network of teachers interested in working with mathematicians. Professors from the UPN established contact with other mathematics educators from universities across Mexico and Canada, including states universities of Yucatán, Zacatecas and Querétaro, as well as UBC, SFU and UofC in Canada.

The program was extremely interesting and the conference was a great success!
The organizers were very generous and they invited not only me, but also three of my students.
One of these three students just graduated but he is in the job market and I hope he will be benefited by
meeting people in the field and having the opportunity to give a talk. The other two students
are in the start of their career (beginning of their 3rd year in the graduate school) so they heard very interesting
mathematics from which they will pick problems to work on. I am very grateful to the organizers
for inviting me and my students!

I had ideas from the talks. I am currently working on a certain class of bivariate orthogonal polynomials. Many lectures were on multiple orthogonal polynomials so I got the idea of trying to extend my work to multiple orthogonal polynomials and I obtained some preliminary results during the meeting. Also talking about my research made me think more about the conceptual aspects of it and this also gave more ideas. I had very productive discussions with Luc Vinet and he was very helpful.

Mourad Ismail Mathematics, University of Central Florida and King Saud University

The workshop gave me the opportunity to interact with leading mathematicians in the field, discuss questions of interest, clarify ideas and inform myself of up to date research. I think it was a great opportunity to take part of it.

It was a privilege to take part in this workshop - I certainly learned a great deal about multiple orthogonal polynomials. In particular, I have begun to work on one of the conjectures posed in one of the talks at the workshop.

As a post-doc, I found this workshop very helpful. I was able to meet a number of important people in the field, get a sense of what is going on across a number of viral dynamics and cancer areas, and deepen my understanding of my own projects.

Participating in the viral dynamics CMO-BIRS workshop has given me the opportunity to interact with leading experts in the modeling of Oncogenic and Oncolytic viruses. After the meeting I look forward to dig deeper into virus dynamics using both theoretical and data driven models.

To be at a 5 day CMO-BIRS workshop was an excellent opportunity to be at the cutting edge of scientific advancement of modeling of cancer and virus dynamics.
This CMO-BIRS workshop provided me full exposure to a very interesting topic where applied mathematicians and physicians can collaborate to push the scientific advancement of cancer treatment.
During my participation, I made new contacts and envision new research projects.
Overall, CMO-BIRS is an excellent effort that should be encouraged in the long run, i.e. more than one workshop on the same topic.

I knew about half the participants, but it was good to meet the others, especially younger people. The variety of models and approaches discussed was impressive. It was also good to have the opportunity to work closely with one of my regular coauthors, who presented some of our joint work.

The workshop was excellent. The discussion was at a high level and I met some really interesting new people. I even had one of those moments where I emailed my research assistant to stop what he was doing until I got back as a result of a paper I heard by someone from Mexico City.

My stay in CMO last week was very useful because calculations of free energy are not an easy thing to perform. Currently I am working on the numerical simulation and modelling of molecular systems which have organic compounds and are very complex. Additionally they undergo processes which make molecular dynamics simulations very limited in the sense that only metastable states can be achieved. Several talks at Oaxaca addressed these kinds of problems and opened new routes for me to learn more about the systems under study at Instituto de Matemáticas, Unidad Cuernavaca.

I have attended several lectures which were of direct interest for my work. I will in particular try out one of the techniques I learned during one of the mathematical presentations from this week on my favorite problems of interest as soon as I come back to work. There were also other lectures, more on the applied side, which raised interesting mathematical questions which I will consider solving/proving.

This was a very-well organized meeting. By listening to talks of experts and conversing with colleagues I have learned a lot and have corrected/expanded my points of view toward the subjects. Being supplied with enough time for discussions with collaborators made the meeting more attractive.

I just wanted to thank Jose Antonio, Hyung-Ju, Reinhard and Bernt for this wonderful workshop. I really enjoyed the atmosphere, the place and the talks. I got a lot of new ideas and contacts for my research. It was a great success for me and time well invested.

I quite enjoyed my stay at CMO last week. It was really a wonderful experience in Oaxaca, as it was the first time for me to visit Mexico. I think that the workshop is very successful due to the big efforts and time of organisers as well as contributions from all participants. I was very happy to be invited to join the workshop and have made good communications with other colleagues in the same research field. Definitely, the workshop provides us a great platform to make academic exchanges and strengthen good relationship of all researchers from different places in the whole world. Indeed I also felt good to meet others and talk to them for the recent research work. Last but not least, I would like to thank you and CMO for making the event possible to occur. We all participants greatly appreciate your hospitality and generous support!!!

Han Feng Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Alberta

The CMO-BIRS workshop was absolutely very important for me, it actually help me in several points to related to my current research, also, I learn about several topics that, although are not strictly related to my current work, were very interesting. I would like to congratulate and thanks to the organizers Feng Dai, Ronald DeVore, Sergey Konyagin, Vladimir Temlyakov and Sergey Tikhonov for organizing an excellent meeting booth from the academic and logistic point of view. Thanks also to CMO and BIRS for an excellent academic experience.

I enjoyed my visit to Oaxaca. It is an enchanting place and good for doing math. I cannot say that it has already helped me obtain further results related to greedy algorithms, but I learned about some new notion in compressed sensing and I am planning to investigate the connection with my previous work.
Also, this was a conference in Approximation Theory, but since there were other people from Banach spaces who work in AT as well, I discussed in Oaxaca some problems in non-linear (metric analysis), related to embeddings of graphs in Banach spaces. The research continued during my trip to College Station immediately after Oaxaca and we obtained some new results. After all, it does not matter if the new results are directly connected to the topic of the conference - what matters is to do mathematics.

During the days I attended, I could interact with a couple of colleagues and found a common ground where we can start a collaboration. In fact I will start next week some regular meetings with them in order to continue our discussions on topics that are somehow new for me. Incidentally, this will also influence (for good) the work with a postdoctoral fellow, who started to work under my supervision.

Contacts with colleagues during CMO-BIRS workshop positively affected my current research in the form of new insights and new research projects. It greatly improved "visibility' of my results. I hope it will lead to new collaborations and new papers.

I found this workshop very useful and stimulating for my research. It gave me a chance to communicate with many leading experts in the area of applied functional analysis, continue existing collaborations and start new ones. The workshop provided an interesting overview of several areas including approximation theory, functional analysis, and numerical analysis through their interaction and applications. I discussed several new projects with participants, and plan to work on them in the nearest future.

The workshop was great. Nearly every talk was related to things we do and contained relevant new information. The schedule had enough free time to allow for extended discussions which often continued over meals. I got to meet many people in the field for the first, and reacquaint with those I've known before. Overall excellent.

Gary StormoProfessor
Department of Genetics, Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine

This workshop was one of the best scientific meetings I have ever attended. The participants were chosen very carefully to represent a wide range of experience in the field (postdocs to senior scientists), but with a clear focus on the scientific area of the workshop (protein-DNA recognition). This made for easy and effective communication among all the participants. I learned a lot from everyone. The scientific focus of the workshop almost perfectly fit my own research interests - I realized when I looked at the program that the workshop participants were all scientists whose papers I invariably read when I come across them in the literature. I especially appreciated the opportunity to meet scientists from Central and Latin America, and this led to at least one future collaboration between my lab and a scientist from South America.